twilight zone

so the last couple of months i’ve been surfing a couple of different blogs looking for style, good management systems and stuff, trying to design mine.

one that i really liked, stylewise etc was followthepenguin. (see any similarities?) i based the style template of my blog on hers.

anyways, today i’m surfing through some of her entries and i find this one, from june 2002 that talks about where she got the idea of “follow the penguin”: she was at a conference and a speaker from ireland was talking and kept going off on tangents, and when asked if there was a saying for this, someone called out “you’re following the penguin”. as soon as i read it i got really freaked out, because *i* was the one who said that. it was one of those totally random occurances. still.. strange.

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even this shall pass…

so today i’m having a little bit of a career crisis. well, maybe crisis is a bit too strong, but i’ve been considering it. all my life i’ve been into computers, working, programming, gaming, hacking. it’s all i’ve ever really done, and i always assumed that i’d do it for a living, and pretty much have been, since i was about 18. i’m employed by a great company, and i don’t really hate my job as such.. but the dillema is this: my work, all the things that i put effort into are entirely transitory. they feed into the ‘capitalist machine’ sure, and keep the economy going, but they’re *virtual*. in 10 years, all the stuff i work on will be gone, no more than a fleeting memory, as opposed to people who work on real, concrete (as opposed to abstract) things. if i were a carpenter, stoneworker, welder, painter, sculptor, writer, great thinker, musician, or architect, then the things i did would really have an effect on this world. my father brought to my thinking the sentiment that “what is important in this world is not what we leave behind but who we touch while we’re here”. i don’t know if that really makes me feel better about what i do, but it’s something to think about anyway.

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